I use a mostly vanilla Emacs on macOS from emacsforosx.com, and I am definitely a laggard when it comes to adopting some of these modern features. I'd love to use eglot to make Emacs as smart as VS Code, but it takes some doing, so I'm still leaning on a TAGS file for navigation.

Meanwhile, each new version seems to break something in my crusty old .emacs file. My latest frustration is that drag and drop stopped working after upgrading from 28 to 29.

I don't know if a starter kit is necessarily the answer, but there's something to be said for a batteries included approach.